


Young and Beautiful

by Jen (ConsultingWriters)



Category: James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Chronological Take on 00Q, Deteriorating Relationship, Developing Relationship, Love, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Relationship Issues, Retirement, This is NOT a fun fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-12
Updated: 2013-09-12
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:01:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConsultingWriters/pseuds/Jen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It would have been kinder</i>, Q thinks, a long time later, <i>if we had both died young.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Young and Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the wonderful Miho's fanvid:
> 
> http://missmho.tumblr.com/post/52891725964/00q-young-and-beautiful-so-i-finished-the
> 
> Now, I'll freely concede that I think I drew different things from the vid than what was originally intended; this song/vid stabbed me in the throat, and this came out. I hope you enjoy, and miho, thank you for one of my favourite fanvids in the history of the world. Jen.

_It would have been kinder_ , Q thinks, a long time later, _if we had both died young._

-

**Day One.**

“Every now and then, a trigger has to be pulled.”

He is young and upstart and cocky and childish, and clearly brilliant, or they would neither of them be there. Quartermaster is not an easy role, and this half-grown young man who thinks he can control the world had better be good.

Mercifully, he’s very, _very_ good.

-

 **Two Weeks**.

“Welcome back,” Q says drily, as Bond smiles smugly and presents him with absolutely no remaining equipment and expects everything to be just _fine_ anyway.

Q raises an eyebrow, and stares at the noticeable absence of anything useful. “Can I help you, given that you evidently have nothing for me?”

Bond shrugs, unperturbed, and watches Q for a while.

-

**Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days.**

Q’s eyes are bright and alive and pained. He stares at computer screens and types at a speed that is barely human. Everything about him is electricity; youth, innovation, truly breathtaking intelligence and _speed_ Bond could watch him in motion forever, his body bending and arching, whirling from screen to tablet to blueprints to the broken, empty skeleton of what could be a gun, one day.

Bond simply stands at the entrance to Q-branch. The banks of monitors glow, alien, lighting the pallid faces of various employees who type and work, are quiet and studious and almost brilliant. Almost, but Q epitomises brilliance, and they are nothing when held against him.

He does not need to look around to know that Bond is there.

A slight smile, and he twists around, adjusting his glasses with eloquent fingers. There is a moment of simple assessment; Bond knows he is being deconstructed, everything he is reduced to almost nothingness. “My office,” he says sharply, with a tone that goes directly to Bond’s groin.

Bond is tall and blonde and blue-eyed and rugged. The pretty-boy juxtaposed with a man who can kill in ways that simply are not documented. Strength that can tears worlds apart, lives apart, cause governments to fall and buildings to burn and he, James Bond, can amble out unscathed and drink a martini ( _shaken, not stirred_ ) and encapsulate everything Q once wished he was.

He doesn’t wish that any more.

The office door closes, and Bond wastes not a single moment.

The mission had been hell, and Q has been waiting for this for the last fortnight, after Bond had flirted and Q reciprocated and both knew, both knew, and all they have needed is to be in the same room at the same time.

Q laughs as he is slammed against his office door, and wonders vaguely if anybody can hear, and Bond’s breath is burningly hot and his body cool, and Q can feel his own blood boiling under the skin because this, _this_ is living, this is the sensation of being utterly and painfully, excruciatingly _alive_.

Because then, of course, alarms start blaring. Double-oh seven is pushed to one side as Q grapples for the phone, lifts it, starts talking in quick-time to an unseen voice and his fingers are twitching, itching.

Bond stands in front of the closed door, a guardian, a _god_.

For a brief moment, Q flashes a smile, phone nestled between shoulder and head, hands free to begin almost frantic typing. He spares one hand for a moment, to shoo Bond out the door, a flapping gesture before returning to the keyboard.

Of course, Bond does nothing of the sort. He just sits down, in the chair opposite Q’s desk, and assumes an expression of casual nonchalance as Q snaps assent at the receiver, busy and brusque and adult.

Q sees him there after a moment, and outright grins.

-

**Seven Months, Two Days.**

Q is thrown against a doorframe, and pushes back, efforts pathetically weak in comparison but necessary nonetheless because they are both screaming out against the world and this is the only way they know how to deal with a damn thing of it: break things, and fuck.

It is not a relationship. It is a mutually convenient arrangement. They have sex once in a while, do not discuss it much; it is what it is, and both are more than content with the arrangement as it stands.

This, however, is a first.

Bond killed, and Q killed, and many different things burned to the ground.

The flight landed, and Bond had found Q, and now they are here.

Q is flying on the pain and adrenaline of seeing, hearing, three of his agents die, and the onus is entirely on him, and it is _his fault_ and the knowledge of that spears into him, again and again, excruciating and immediate, and he claws and bites and screams out, sobs out, kissing Bond messily and drawing blood from lips and skin and lets out open-mouthed cries that could be almost anything, peppering the air, ripping it open with his inability to fix the things he is supposed to be best at.

Bond has not said a single word, and that is – in some ways – worse.

He has screamed a lot too, but that is for Q, that is reciprocity; Q needs to hear that he is there, that Bond is there too, so the foreplay is a mess of anger and need and want and hate.

When they fall into bed, when Bond finally drives into Q’s body, both fall utterly silent. Q sobs silently against the sheets, Bond kissing away the damp salt, holding Q like he could fall apart at the slight touch ( _and maybe he can_ ) and Q lets him, because this is what Bond needs. He needs to know that he can take care of something breakable, and it will survive in the end.

They will both survive, because they have to.

-

**One Year, Ten Months, One Week, One Day.**

Q smiles, raises an eyebrow, as Bond places a cup of Earl Grey on the desk. “Shouldn’t you be in Kenya?” he asks mildly, taking a sip; the man is well-trained, these days, knows precisely how to make a tea that is actually palatable.

“I probably should be,” Bond concedes, slinking around the edge of Q’s desk, leaning against the polished glass and metal effort and glancing over the Quartermaster’s eloquent features, the playful arch of eyebrow. “But then, I had something more important to attend to here.”

The smile turns into something almost breathless, almost teenage. “I…”

“I’ll pick you up at eight?” Bond suggests, not bothering to hide his satisfaction at Q’s reaction. “I have a table ready, so please don’t get distracted by 003 playing silly buggers in China.”

Q nods mutely, delightedly, holding the Earl Grey in his designated 'Q' mug against his chest with quiet disbelief, as though it can curiously protect him from anything and everything, from even the emphasis of Bond’s words. The inherent implication.

One year ago, precisely, James Bond had extended a hand to his Quartermaster, and asked if he would like to go to dinner. One year ago, precisely, it had become a relationship.

One year ago, precisely, they had made love like it truly _mattered_ , and discovered in tandem that there was something intangible there that needed to survive, somehow, _somehow_.

-

 **Two Years, Eleven Months, Three Weeks**.

“James, what in the world…?”

Q had smiled and sighed and accepted Bond’s extended hand, and is now wondering what Bond could possibly be doing that requires him to have his eyes closed and mobile confiscated and hauled out of Q-branch with everybody giggling and shooting him looks and evidently in possession of far more knowledge than Q has on this subject.

Bond’s arms snake around Q’s waist, and hold onto him carefully as they go up in the MI6 lift; Q is now definitely confused, smiling despite himself as Bond’s hand remains over his eyes, and every other sense overcompensates to make up for the loss.

Q is guided forward, and Bond’s hand disappears from over his eyes. His glasses have steamed slightly, and Bond has smeared them a little, and it takes a moment to see that he has set a table up on the roof of MI6, looking out over London. Plates and knives and forks and a bottle of wine. “What’s all this in aid of?” he asks, with a slightly dry note.

“Prying you out of HQ is near enough impossible,” Bond says simply, and the rest is patently obvious: Q doesn’t have to leave. It is mocking and playful and romantic and perfect, and Bond knows full well that Q is rendered putty with gestures like this, on days when it is utterly unexpected and is not an emphatic date or time or anything, it is just James being James  _because_.

They kiss with a softly passionate frenzy, and goosebumps rise at the cold breeze on exposed skin.

-

 **Four Years, One Month, Six Days**.

“Merry Christmas!”

The cries echo around the offices, and Q laughs and holds up his nth glass of some Christmas cocktail that Tanner had created and Eve had perfected, and wonders quite how everything is still surviving. Everybody is still surviving, against all the odds.

Shadows live in the corners, but MI6 is the kind of place where everybody knows about the shadows, and there is a mutual consensus that nobody talks about them.

Alec Trevelyan lives in the distant corner, for example, beneath the arches of Q’s old weapons testing ground, where he had kissed Moneypenny and been quite rightly slapped, before asking her more nobly to dinner, and she had agreed with an elegant smile and turned on her heel, striding away.

He died three weeks ago. Eve looks slightly less haunted now, but the spectre still exists, and nobody can deny that.

Bond is not a ghost, not yet, but he is going to be soon. Everybody can see it. Inch by inch, he is slipping; it is unavoidable. The body degenerates with age, despite every effort, and there is a loss of agility and immediacy and the edge that double-oh agents need, and thus Bond is no longer what MI6 need.

This will be his last Christmas as a double-oh agent. He knows that, Q knows that, everybody knows that.

Q glances around, trying fruitlessly to find him, and closes his eyes a moment.

Bond is not a ghost, not yet, but he wants to be.

-

**Four Years, Ten Months, One Week, One Day.**

Four years. It has been four years.

Bond has been committed to a single person for the duration, as has Q, and they are perfectly deliriously wonderfully happy and are MI6’s golden couple, they disprove every rule, agents can live and Quartermasters can love and relationships can survive the black hole of MI6.

Of course they can.

Bond is teaching a collection of MI6 recruits; MI6 had to find something to do with him, it is probably unsafe to allow a man with his level of combat training to just roam around the world on his own. It is best to keep him close, just in case, just in case.

Somewhere in the bowels of MI6, Q is watching Bond on CCTV when he is supposed to be watching a mission with the new 007, heart breaking at the sight of _his_ 007, who is evidently losing his temper completely with his attempts to teach a collection of inept children to shoot in a goddamn straight line.

Irony: now Bond is no longer an agent, he is an absolutely impeccable marksman.

Q waves away some minion who appears at his elbow with tea and biscuits, feeling his mind stretching as he accommodates keeping Bond safe with keeping his agents safe, and trying to keep _himself_ safe.

He is juggling too much, all at once, and is now waiting with quiet resignation to see which ball will drop first.

-

**Five Years, Three Months, Three Weeks, Two Days**

“Hey,” Q says happily, seeing Bond walk into Q-branch; he still has an access code, of course, despite no longer being on MI6’s payroll.

Unsurprisingly, Bond had given up entirely on the teaching lark. M had pulled him into his office, and politely asked Bond to no longer teach, given that he was terrorising more than imparting knowledge.

Bond has money anyway, now. MI6 have a handsome retirement plan for double-oh agents, mostly because they almost never have to pay out.

Q is working, because he is always working, blinking exhaustion out of the hollow darkness of his eye sockets, and Bond has just arrived back from a month in China after citing that he has never _seen_ China through anything other than a gun’s sights, and he felt he really should.

It turns out that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about seeing China. He doesn’t care much about seeing anywhere, because he is so used to the crosshair obscuring his view that the absence is physically painful, it aches like nothing he could believe.

Bond smiles, and it is a little difficult. “Hey,” he replies softly, reaching for Q's hand, covering the cold fingers with his own warm ones. “How have you been?”

-

 **Five Years, Ten Months, One Week, One Day**.

It is turning into something ugly.

Q is slammed into a doorframe, and his head ricochets, and it is damp and red and sticky when Bond knots a hand into his hair, dragging him into a kiss, and Q bites down on Bond’s lip and gouges lines down his side with blunt nails, and lets Bond throw him towards the bed, collapsing back.

He knows a lot of self-defence, these days. Bond has been teaching him, keeps teaching him, in the spare seconds they can steal when they’re not fucking or arguing or ignoring. Q knows he could get away, if he wanted, but he _doesn’t_ want to; he wants to be hurt.

Bond doesn’t comment on the paleness of Q’s skin, or the whiteness where ribs are illustrated, more pronounced than Bond remembers ever seeing before. He doesn’t comment on the fact that Q’s eyes are sharp and cold and dead when Bond fucks him, or that he doesn’t speak, not once, despite the fact that Bond had said no word of greeting before diving on his partner, starting _this,_ some twist of a relationship that has not existed before, not like this. This is wrong.

It is five years, today, and both of them have forgotten.

-

**Six Years, One Day.**

Bond wakes up feeling roughly like he has been beaten to hell and back, which really, pretty much accurately sums up what happened. Bond decided to unofficially re-instate himself as an active agent after seeing a collection of Q’s files that had been left open on his laptop, got himself to Iraq, very nearly got himself killed, got airlifted back by his lover, placed in an MI6 hospital under heavy surveillance, has been unconscious for nine days.

Q is not there when he wakes.

-

 **Six Years, Four Days**.

“You’re a bloody irresponsible idiot. You nearly died. I had to drop everything I was doing to bail you out of a fucking ridiculous situation that you should not have been in. I’m so _angry_ , I can’t even begin to express, you selfish _wanker_.”

“I can’t be here the whole time, I can’t do it anymore.”

“You think I like having you pacing the flat like a fucking caged animal…?”

“I think you’re constantly at work, so you don’t _know_ what I’m doing day after day, and have no idea that I’m going _insane_ on my own. I’m spending four hours a day on a shooting range just to keep myself from going on a killing spree.”

“Superb. So you’re my next major public safety risk.”

“Don’t you dare. I didn’t have to retire, I didn’t _want_ to retire. There’s a reason double-oh agents don’t retire, they die. They die in action. They live and go out with a bang, not festering until old age or simple _boredom_ take them out.”

“Do you _want_ to die?!”

Silence.

“… oh god.”

-

**Six Years, Five Months, Two Weeks.**

Q has been crying, although he would never admit to it at gunpoint; he has enough pride left to remain very much in one piece, despite everybody’s best efforts to the contrary, despite _life’s_ best efforts to make him fall to pieces, fracture down fault lines.

Bond is mute. He will remain mute. He always remains mute.

There are no options left; the last few months have passed in a haze of therapy and stress and overwork and a good proportion of those for Q, not for Bond, because he hasn’t been eating and the spectres refuse to leave any more and when he is alone he cannot stop crying.

Of course, Bond has no idea what to say; the last few months have been excruciating for him too, for reasons that are almost entirely selfish.

Bond is now nothing.

Q knows that.

Q is now nothing.

He knows that, too.

They cannot try and keep the other one together, when they are too broken to even keep themselves in one piece. It doesn’t work, they have seen it doesn’t work, and much though they might wish it they cannot keep trying to make it work.

It was a good run. Longer than anybody had expected. Longer than either had dared wish for, when they entered into the strange little thing that was their relationship. It has been a wonderful few years, a terrible few years, but there are no regrets.

Bond leaves, and Q stops pretending.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry.
> 
> Comments et cetera are gratefully received, if you have the inclination. Jen.


End file.
